It would be impossible ever to say what the most exciting thing about visiting Munich was since it was all the most exciting thing, but one of the most most exciting things was visiting the Propyläen and Glyptothek “temples” of the Königsplatz featured in Dario Argento’s Suspiria. (The scaffolding behind the Propyläen is at the Lenbachhaus.)
Suspiria just celebrated its 35th anniversary. Here is the spectacular scene in which Daniel (Silvio Bucci) crosses the square with his German Shepherd dog:
David Gordon Green (George Washington, Pineapple Express) is doing a remake of Suspiria, and of course Argento purists hate this — on its face this film is desperately not in need of a do-over — but Green has said his version will be shot in Munich, and, I mean, George Washington and Pineapple Express are great, so, I’m for it…
It was so encouraging when Lifetime began airing movies having some resonance to the lives of real teens; a particular highlight was Speak, the wonderful adaptation of the teen fiction novel by Laurie Halse Anderson. Less well-executed but at least somewhat credible was Augusta, Gone, but this aught-year Don’t Ask Alice also benefited from the literary skeleton of Martha Tod Dudman’s autobiographical work of the same name.
Normal Adolescent Behavior however is so sordid, so nasty, that even adults will come away from this two-hour skank fest (significantly padded by endless montages of the core group of six teens dressing, undressing, “hanging out,” and in one particularly creepy aside having a Cabaret-motifed karaoke party).
The plot of this movie basically concerns a sextet of polyamorous high school students (though the word polyamorous never is uttered) which is nasty enough. The girls who proclaim that they’re special because they don’t do pole dances and stuff like that are insanely surgically enhanced, particularly the borderline blonde.
A lot of the group sex is pretty much shown, as much as can be on regular cable, but as if that’s not sick-making enough, there’s an even weirder scene (which has no relevance to the plot) of Amber Tamblyn begging an “outsider” boy to spank her as she wiggles her floral-grandma-panties-clad ass).
The moral of the story seems to be that polyamorous relationships aren’t bad, just temporal, and that if your little brother spends all his time cooking for the Desperate Housewives-style neighbor and babbling about frisee, well, that’s about the best the burbs have to offer.
Despite is queasiness-inducement this film is also very boring; the two hours will seem like five. Must to avoid.
This film is criminally underknown, if that’s the right word…despite winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance , there just doesn’t seem to be even any underground buzz, not even amid the scifi community. Primer is wholly the creation of Shane Carruth, an actual engineer from Dallas, and he did the entire production – editing, script, direction, music, bulidng the machine – entirely himself. This is a cerebral, non-special-effects-driven science fiction piece which appears at first to be about time travel, but its more accurately should be described as cloning, and the moral (and practical) ramifications thereof.
Carruth, who greatly resembles the other great underrated actor of horror and scifi, Jeffrey Combs from ReAnimator, is a genius, but is frustratingly apparently laying low. He hasn’t commented, even on his own message board, about whether he will make another movie.
